My mother stopped stirring whatever was in the pot. My father’s newspaper lowered inch by inch until I could see his face and his jaw was so tight I could see the muscle twitching near his ear. They were both staring at my hand. My left hand, the one holding the pencil. See, I’m left-handed.

I’ve been left-handed since I could hold a crayon. And in my family, that was basically the same as being born with horns and a tail. My parents had this thing, this belief that left-handedness was wrong. Not just inconvenient or unusual, but actually morally wrong. Like being left-handed meant there was something broken inside you that could never be fixed.

They’d spent my entire childhood trying to cure me. When I was five, my mother would take the crayon out of my left hand and shove it into my right over and over until I was crying so hard I couldn’t see the coloring book anymore. When I was eight, my father made me write lines with my right hand every night for a month. I will use my proper hand.

I will use my proper hand. 500 times. My handwriting looked like a seismograph reading and my wrist achd for weeks, but I still couldn’t do it. My brain just wasn’t wired that way. But the worst was when I was 12. I’d been doing homework that night, too. Math, I think. And I was writing with my left hand because my parents weren’t home and I was tired of pretending.